7/30/2008

“I’ve seen racism in campaigns before — I’ve seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I’ve seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, when his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was alleged, by the charming friends and allies of then-Gov. George W. Bush, to have been a McCain love-child with an African-American woman.

What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.”

“One spin of the outbreak wheel, and your industry may be bankrupt, your loved ones sickened.”

He’s referring to the recent outbreak of salmonella from contaminated tomatoes/jalapenos that sickened 1,300 and left the tomato industry reeling.

The FDA’s Dr. Lonnie King, director of the center for foodborne illnesses at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Cardoza’s subcommittee that “We have a smoking gun, it appears.” Federal officials advised the subcommittee that the same salmonella strain linked to the nationwide outbreak was “found in irrigation water and in a sample from a batch of serrano peppers” at a Mexican farm. It was also found at a second Mexican farm and a South Texas produce warehouse.

Food safety officials have not yet determined whether tomatoes can be ruled out but industry officials complained that they lost weeks of revenue totaling more than $300M while federal officials tracked down the wrong product.

The Chinese government confirmed today that, despite previous assurances by it and the International Olympic Committee, the internet will be censored during the games:

“Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages – politically sensitive ones that discuss Tibetan succession, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.”

The report states that the IOC “quietly agreed” to some of the limitations but will press the Chinese government to reconsider.

The Washington Post reports on a study that concludes illegal immigration into the US is down 10% over the past year, especially among less educated 18 to 40-year-old Hispanic immigrants, and it’s apparently due in part to stepped-up government enforcement and other incentives:

“The evidence is consistent with the idea that at least initially more robust enforcement caused the number of illegal immigrants to decline significantly,” said Steven A. Camarota, one of the study’s authors. “Some people seem to think illegals are so permanently anchored in the United States that there is no possibility of them leaving. . . . This suggests they’re not correct. Some significant share might respond to changing incentives and leave.

There is general agreement among demographers that illegal immigration is declining but the experts do not agree on why this has occurred. The study indicates the decline in less educated Hispanic immigrants began after Congress abandoned immigration reform while the number of educated non-Hispanic immigrants continued to rise. The study concludes immigrants changed their behavior in response to the failure of legalization legislation:

“Even more contentious is the question of what, if anything, the study’s findings indicate about the impact that recent national and local immigration policies may have had on the size of the illegal immigrant population. Since December, the unemployment rate of less-educated working-age Hispanics has risen from 4.93 percent to 7.06 percent, making it that much more difficult to determine whether the continued decline in their population during this period was the result of anything beyond basic economics.

But [study authors] Camarota and Jensenius suggest that the six-month decline that occurred after the failure of the legalization legislation and before the rise of these workers’ unemployment rate is one of several examples of a link between immigration policy and immigrant choices. They note, for instance, that starting in May 2007, when Congress’s consideration of the legalization plan began receiving widespread media attention, the number of less-educated, working-aged Hispanics began to rise.

“I call it the amnesty hump,” said Camarota. Though he noted that the population increase during this period may not have been statistically significant, “it seems that what was happening was that fewer illegal immigrants left than might otherwise have done so because they were hoping to qualify for legalization.”

Experts also debate whether there are fewer illegal immigrants in the US because not as many have immigrated or because more have left. The study’s authors acknowledge that the answer to that question is unclear based solely on Census data, but they believe “if less-educated Hispanic adults were not leaving in greater numbers than before, their total population would merely grow more slowly, not decline steeply.”

Finally, most of the immigrants who left did so voluntarily since “only 285,000 immigrants were removed from within the United States in 2007 — and many of those were formerly legal immigrants who lost their status after committing a crime.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced today he would step down in September and would not run in the Kadima Party primary. The AP described Olmert as angry as he criticized the corruption investigations that forced him to:

“… defend myself against relentless attacks from self-appointed ‘fighters for justice’ who sought to depose me from my position, when the ends sanctified all the means.”

At times, Olmert’s popularity in the polls has sunk below 20% causing some political analysts to predict he would resign. The AP report states that Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is the early favorite to replace Olmert, which would make her and Golda Meir the only female Israeli prime ministers.

My knowledge of Israeli politics is limited so I don’t have any meaningful insights to add to this story but I’m sure there are readers and commenters who have valuable thoughts to share. However, I couldn’t pass it up because of the statement by Dan Margalit, “an Israeli political analyst and longtime friend of Olmert,” who described Olmert’s resignation as “a sad end to a miserable career.”

The front page of the L.A. Times print edition yesterday ran a headline reading “Sex Bias Seen at Justice Dept.” It was about alleged bias based on sexual orientation. Eugene Volokh calls the headline “an outright mischaracterization of what’s going on,” because

“sex bias” has a familiar meaning to the reading public, and that meaning is discrimination against men or women, not against gays or lesbians.

I agree. Apparently, so do the editors, because the Web version of the headline (I can’t pull up the story itself) now reads “Sexuality bias” rather than “Sex bias.”

The NYT in this story out today has the final exam questions given by Obama to the Con Law III students at the Univ. of Chicago law school from 1997 to 2003. They make for some interesting reading, and left me scratching my head.

But the manner in which the problems are expressed suggest a huge liberal bias.

This post is simply an invitation to review them and discuss them in the comments section. After I have a chance to digest them further, I’ll have a few posts on individual exam questions that spark my interest.

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